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There has been quite a bit of scholarship on the history of the space race, but collaboration in space has received little attention and has usually been dismissed as a propaganda side show. This book thus fills a critical gap by showing the importance of collaboration in space as an antidote to Cold War hostilities and as an important yet underappreciated episode in the development of science and technology in the twentieth century.
Jenks describes how a handful of commissars and Apollo Lunar Module pilots saw space exploration as an alternative to the Cold War, but the ruthless apparatchiks who wrote the checks—Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon—were not the ones with their heads in the clouds. Their pieties about “universal brotherhood” were simpleminded and solipsistic, uttered in the hope that history would remember these two warmongers as better men than they knew they were.—Matthew Lavine and Alexandra Hui.
List of Illustrations; Introduction: An Alternative History of the Space Age; 1. Handshakes in Space and the Cold War Imaginary; 2. Transnational Identity and the Limits of Cosmic Collaboration; 3. Androgynous Coupling, Technological Fixes, and the Engineering of Peace; 4. Securitization and Secrecy in the Cold War: The View from Space; Conclusion: Cooperation and ASTP’s Enduring Legacies; Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index.